News Archive

Torture lab kills trees to learn how to save them

8/26/2012In the arid Southwest, the body count is especially high. Besides trying to keep wildfires from burning up these desiccated forests, there's not much anyone can do. In fact, scientists are only now figuring out how drought affects trees.Read More

In southwest, worst case scenario plays out

8/24/2012As the Earth's average temperature creeps upward, climate scientists have predicted record heat waves and droughts. That's what we've seen this summer in the U.S.Read More

Is it too late to defuse the danger of megafires?

8/24/2012Forests in the Southwest have become a fuel stockpile. A century of U.S. Forest Service policy of quashing all fires has allowed forests to become overgrown, and now a warming climate is making the problem worse.Read More

Why forest-killing megafires are the new normal

8/23/2012Fire scientists are calling it "the new normal": a time of fires so big and hot that no one can remember anything like it.Read More

Our changing forests: an 88-year time lapse

8/23/2012Intense forest fires have been raging across the western United States this summer. So far this year, nearly 43,000 wildfires have torched almost 7 million acres of land.Read More

How the Smokey Bear effect led to raging wildfires

8/23/2012The history of fire in the American Southwest is buried in a catacomb of rooms under the bleachers of the football stadium at the University of Arizona.Read More

Winslow mill site chosen

8/21/2012A Montana-based company has secured agreements to buy 500 acres in Winslow and is seeking financing from venture capitalists to build a multimillion-dollar lumber mill.Read More

Forest Service now tries to tamp out every flame

8/17/2012If lightning strikes in the New Mexico wilderness and starts a fire, the blaze would normally be little more than a blip on the radar of land managers who have earned a reputation for letting flames burn to keep forested lands from growing into a tangled mess.Read More